


Epistolary

by thedevilchicken



Series: Epistolic [2]
Category: The Following
Genre: M/M, Rough Sex, Sexual Content, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-14
Updated: 2014-10-14
Packaged: 2018-02-21 04:30:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2454797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follow-up to <i>Epistolic</i>, Joe makes a discovery.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Epistolary

They were married in the prison chapel.

Joe thought that was the very height of irony, given their past and given their circumstances, but Ryan just scoffed at him and said that was how things like this were handled. Joe supposed Ryan knew more about this sort of thing than he did.

It did still feel strange, however, standing there by the cheap plywood altar and its polyester altar cloth, a Justice of the Peace standing by who’d likely had to be coerced into participation. He wasn’t surprised to find said Justice performed a very nervous ceremony, given the events that had transpired the last time Joe Carroll set foot inside a place of worship; it was over in minutes, the words stuttered and hurried, not at all what he’d envisioned. It was quite a bitter disappointment.

They let him wear a suit for the occasion, though, one that Ryan brought in that pinched a little at the collar but was otherwise moderately serviceable. Ryan wore one, too, and Joe thought back to the last time he’d seen that particular sight, all those years ago, back at his very first trial. Ryan looked different now, more worn around the edges, getting older though Joe supposed he’d never lose that certain boyish charm of his. The suit looked good on him, but obviously Joe knew that he’d feel vastly more at ease in a t-shirt and jeans. Joe himself would have felt more at ease had they trusted him without his wrists and ankles shackled. However, he couldn’t say he blamed them.

The civil ceremony lacked in any form of _you may kiss_ , and they didn’t touch at all throughout. Ryan barely looked at him, though Joe sneaked the odd glance in his direction; he admired his profile, the drape of his suit. Joe wouldn’t be allowed a ring in prison so the ceremony also lacked bitterly in jewellery. It didn’t lack in guards, however, two of whom flanked the bolted chapel door, hands resting on batons that hung at their belts. Joe toyed with the idea of grabbing at one, but that was an idea he did only ever toy with; he’d been a model prisoner for two whole years by then, since that day with the twins, the end of that chapter, since his reincarceration. He hadn’t so much as harmed a hair on anybody’s head, depressingly enough. It looked better for his appeal that way.

There were rooms in the prison grounds set up expressly for conjugal visits. Joe had always found the idea to be something of a nonsense before that particular day; surely prison was prison, walls had been erected for a purpose and the essential reality of conviction should not involve regular visits from one’s spouse. But that was their final destination that day, Ryan walking in front, Joe making his steady, shackled way behind. The first guard unlocked the door and the second unlocked Joe’s cuffs. They backed from the room, eyes not straying from Joe for a second, just in case. After all, after everything he’d done, it was only sensible for them to take precautions. He was dangerous. They locked the door behind them as they left. Ryan, of course, had never balked at danger.

The room was small, painted a painful stark white that almost glowed neon-bright under the humming fluorescent tube light, up overhead behind its perp-proof protective cage. It was like an asylum with its bleach-white sheets on the metal-framed bed, with the water in its plastic jug with plastic glasses on a cheap chipboard dresser. Everything was nailed down. Joe looked around in quiet disgust, rubbing his chafed red wrists and then his broken nose. It was all so tawdry. This wasn’t him at all. And then he turned away from the locked white door to look at Ryan.

His arms were crossed over his chest, his stance defensive, his expression unreadable.

"I suppose congratulations are in order, Mr Carroll," Joe said, smiling faintly, and Ryan rolled his eyes.

"Don’t kid around, Joe," he said. "We need to start. We don’t have much time."

***

The letter had come as a complete surprise, however much Joe tried to tell himself he’d expected it. He’d been writing to Ryan for nearly 18 months by then, once a week, every week, and hadn’t heard so much as a peep in return; he’d had very little reason to believe he’d ever hear from him again, if he were honest. He hadn’t wanted to believe that Ryan actually intended to move on from him, despite the words they’d shared as he’d been taken away, something about never seeing him again, something about putting the past behind him. Joe had made the conscious decision then to disbelieve. But weeks passed, months passed, a whole year came and went and Joe heard nothing. He wondered if this was what loneliness felt like. He told himself he didn’t care, that he was above that kind of petty sentiment. 

And then, one morning, they gave him his mail just like they always did. He sat in his cell and he read letter after dull new letter, telling him he was loved or he was hated, promises of salvation mixed variously with damnation to hell and professions of undying affection. There were flashes sometimes, a certain mode of desperation that reminded him of what he’d had and what he might just have again, but he’d given that up, at least for now. He didn’t want another following. He refused to be a one-trick pony. 

But then, there was the letter. _The_ letter. It looked no different from the rest, had been opened by the prison staff just like the rest, shoved haphazardly into to a nondescript new envelope just like the rest. They did that so he wouldn’t know the address of the sender, and he saw their point considering his previous proclivities. He’d often wondered why they hadn’t been stricter sooner.

He didn’t recognise the handwriting, saw only cheap ballpoint on cheap lined paper from a legal pad at first, though that actually stood out from the rest in a certain strange way; some letters came on overtly expensive laid paper, and most were written with an instrument somewhat more discerning than the same black ballpoint you could find in any shop anywhere in any country. His followers had a history as a rather odd and slightly obsessive lot at best, given to the poetry of his actions, and as such they liked to make a certain impression when they wrote to him. A plastic biro wasn’t exactly akin to a Mont Blanc; it didn’t scream _I love you, Joe, pick me_.

But he read. And an unfamiliar knot began to form in him as the words sank in. His shoulders tensed, he clenched his jaw. He found he was digging his fingernails into his palms so hard that it hurt, that it caused him physical pain, so hard that he was on the verge of drawing blood.

>   
> _Dear Joe,_
> 
> _I don’t know where to start._
> 
> _I got your letters. I read them. Your style’s improved, I’ll give you that. The novel was derivative bullshit._
> 
> _It’s me in the letters, yeah? That’s fucking twisted, Joe. Get some help._
> 
> _Don’t stop. I’ll read._
> 
> _Ryan_  
> 

What on earth was he to make of that? He was physically shaking as he read it for the second time, and then the third. Then he folded the paper and slipped it back into the plain white envelope, and he sat down on his bed. He lay down on his bed, tense. He barred an arm over his eyes. He felt jittery, on edge, bewildered; he twisted his fingers into the scratchy sheets as his mind tilted oddly to one side. 

_Don’t stop_ , Ryan said. _Don’t stop_. He’d read the letters. He’d read all of the letters. 

Joe had started to write all those months ago as if Ryan would be reading, as if they’d still had a connection. He wrote the first handful of letters with a faint soupçon of regret because what else could he have felt then but regret? It had all come to an end, so of course he felt regret. Perhaps Ryan would respond to that. Perhaps he also had regrets. His whole life was such obvious penance; he _had_ to have regrets.

Then he wrote because he thought perhaps Ryan would respond to fiction, because he’d always expressed such a strong reaction - albeit negative - to his novel. He’d psychoanalysed every syllable until Joe was barely certain of his own literary intentions any longer. He thought perhaps more of the same would bait him somehow, elicit a reaction where none had been previously forthcoming. Of course, that particular tactic had also fallen flat and failed.

And so, he’d gone for shock. He’d started light, goading him with confession that essentially confessed not one thing, saying everything but nothing at all about those earliest killings, the ones that Ryan had come to campus to investigate, the ones that had been the means of their introduction. No reply, of course, and so he moved on, grew darker, moved deeper, dredging out what he could of his motives, summoning up his reactions, his intentions, his wishes and desires. He’d known it was getting out of hand, of course, knew it as he sat to write there in his cell, but it hardly seemed to matter at all what he wrote because no reply ever came. He was probably burning all those letters, throwing them unopened into the nearest waste paper basket with unsolicited political flyers and tacky takeaway menus. All those hours wasted. It was hurtful. Why wouldn’t he respond after everything they’d shared? He was wounded. Ryan had wounded him, so he would wound Ryan. Fictionally, of course; he was still behind bars, after all.

That was how it started. The notion came suddenly, flooded in and by the time Joe thought to attempt to reject it, it had already trickled into every little part of him, it was far too late to flush it out. He’d never really meant to kill Ryan, of course. He’d thought about it, schemed for it, he’d had people in place to take care of it should it ever have to come to that, but surely he couldn’t be blamed for one of his followers making such an independent attempt on Ryan’s life after his own had supposedly ended. Planning surely didn’t equal statement of intent. Except, perhaps it did. Perhaps Ryan hadn’t died because Joe hadn’t meant for someone else to kill him. Perhaps he was still living and breathing in the world because Joe was meant to be the one to end his life.

In bed that night, beneath the starchy prison sheets, his imagination brought the scene to life. The knife was his favourite, one he’d regretfully given up so long ago, sharp and bright and weighty in his hand, a lovely heft to it. The leather of Ryan’s jacket gave much more resistance than his flesh as he pressed the knife point in, pushed it up, felt the warm rush of blood flooding over his hand, soaking his cuff, dripping from his wrist. The look on Ryan’s face was a true thing of beauty, perhaps more surprise than pain, surprise that faded into resignation then acceptance as Joe’s palm cradled the back of his neck, guiding him down to the floor as he bled. He lay down beside him, close to him, watching. The moment the light in Ryan’s blue eyes went dull was bliss. The moment he died, Joe found ecstasy. 

He wrote it to him. Every last detail of every sensation went down onto paper and he sent it, the mere act of dispatch exciting a frisson of delight. It was terrible, of course, because he knew what killing really meant to him, what Ryan knew it meant to him, what an unexpected insight it would give were he to ever read that letter. He agonised over it for the next few days, pacing in his cell, caught between anguish and exultation, until he couldn’t keep himself from writing down its sequel. It was Ryan again. It would always be Ryan again, from that point forward.

His letters became a constant means of self-revelation. Suddenly he understood just how little he’d known himself, just how superficial his desires had always been. In his letters, he was free of inhibition in a way he’d never truly been before; in his letters, in a space outside the bounds of any strict reality he’d ever known, Joe could speak in earnest, could speak around the barrier to open dialogue that was his narcissism. In that space, they screamed and kicked and bit, they talked together over dinner, they undressed each other in a hail of liberated shirt buttons and creative curses. He cut the clothes from Ryan’s body, the tip of his knife always slipping just a fraction, accidentally on purpose. He’d watch as the blood welled up and then lick it away, smear it with his tongue against Ryan’s smooth skin. Then they’d kiss and somehow that didn’t feel as odd to him as he thought it should. Ryan wouldn’t ever think to shoot him in the head. They’d expire at the point of orgasm.

 _Don’t stop_ , Ryan said. _I’ll read_.

He’d received every letter. He’d read them all. Joe felt sick and felt giddy and threw up into the jail cell toilet, wiped his face, breathed too quickly, didn’t know how to process the thought. He wasn’t wired for this kind of reaction in any conceivable way. He had to steady himself and think it through, remembering he’d once made quite the living from literary analysis.

 _Don’t stop_. A command. An expression of desire, a requirement. Want. Ryan didn’t want his letters to stop. Ryan wanted him to keep on writing.

 _I’ll read_. Indicative. A statement of intent. After everything else, after his persistent disgust and his insistent derision, his intention was to read. He wanted to read. More than that: he wanted to read what Joe wanted to write. Joe wanted to write a relationship that couldn’t and wouldn’t exist in the world. Joe wanted to write Ryan as the conscience that he lacked, as the equal he required, as the lover he desired. Ryan wanted to read that. Ryan wanted that. Ryan wanted _him_.

It took time to gather his thoughts and check them for consistency and errors, to check them for a trap. He found none, at least none that seemed remotely feasible or reasonably free from paranoia, and what exactly did that matter anyway? Then he sat at the table there in his cell and he picked up his pen. He agonised.

>   
> _Dear Ryan,_
> 
> _It seems I’ve written as if without an audience. Please excuse my self-indulgence._
> 
> _I do hope, quite sincerely, that we can maintain a correspondence in the future. I value your honesty above all things. Be honest with me now, Ryan: what prompted your response?_
> 
> _I’ve told you my stories. I’m intrigued to hear one of yours._
> 
> _Warm regards,_
> 
> _Joe_  
> 

He carried on as normal once the letter was sent. He was by no means certain that he’d receive any response, taking into consideration just how long it had been before Ryan had put pen to paper even once; he wasn’t sure another 67 weeks of waiting was feasible for him, given that he lived his life under a judicial sword of Damocles, let alone desirable. He supposed, however, that he could slip with relative ease into his usual routine if he had to, his usual letters, his usual disregard for the proper epistolary etiquette. 

He went about his business, reading his new mail with the same mere faint passing interest, eating the same bland food day by day, having the same non-conversations in those brief times that they marched him out into the yard for exercise. He had to admit that prison had done something for him in terms of his health; he’d lost a little weight, he’d gained a little muscle, hadn’t had a drink in very nearly two years. Who knew that prison worked so well for one’s underlying alcoholism.

But then a new reply arrived. He knew what to look for this time because the handwriting was now familiar, the way Ryan dotted the J in Joe, the sharp angles of his Ws and Vs and Ms. It was penmanship with purpose rather than with flair. It was practical just like the rest of him, which Joe found he could appreciate.

>   
> _Joe,_
> 
> _What prompted my response? I saw you in court. I wanted to shoot you. I wouldn’t have missed._
> 
> _Story: I thought about it later. I want to do everything to you that you want to do to me. You make me sick. I make myself sick._
> 
> _Do I need to spell it out?_
> 
> _Ryan_  
> 

All Joe could do was laugh. He chuckled, he chortled, he chuffed; he smiled as he ate his bland prison food, surely all but devoid of even basic nutrients, and shook his head as he thought it all through line by line. What he’d suspected was true, there it was in black and white. Ryan hated himself for wanting him. Ryan wanted everything that Joe wanted, and Joe wanted _so many_ things in so many different ways. He lay awake that night trying to picture Ryan’s righteous turmoil, how many sleepless nights he’d tossed and turned, struggling to persuade himself he should stay true to his word and move on without Joe in the footnotes. How many sleepless nights he’d spent with his cock in his hand and Joe in his head. They were a matched pair, he and Ryan. It had taken them both far too long to see it. 

His reply to Ryan’s reply was a fantasy, pure and simple. It was Joe’s college office surrounded by books and their lives before he'd let Ryan figure him out so completely. It was a test to see if Ryan had ever reread that moment the way that he had; it was an exercise in hindsight, and in rewriting history. He remembered every detail of the scene, that first night in his home just off campus, practically a scene of seduction in itself now he thought of it. Ryan had smiled over his drink in the darkened room, a half-embarrassed private smile he’s never seen again, glanced at him when he thought he couldn’t see it. He’d seen it. And if he’d known then what he knew now, the tale would have taken a different twist. 

Ryan would have let Joe do anything that he wanted. He’d have paused for one long moment and then let himself go into it. He’d have been eager.

>   
> _Joe,_
> 
> _It wouldn’t have worked. Don’t think I’ve not thought that through._
> 
> _The hearing is coming up. Work on your appeal. We won’t let things slide without a fight._
> 
> _Ryan_  
> 

He was right, of course; his next hearing was coming up quickly and he did need to prepare. Not to the detriment of his regular epistles, but it did require some small amount of concentration. He’d had time during his previous incarceration to read his way into the legal complexities of his situation. Yes, of course, it was almost beyond a doubt that his condemnation to death would stand firm, but the wonder of the US legal system was the convict’s right to appeal. Joe had seized that right with particular vigour. It wasn’t much of a defence that he had, basically amounted to a mixture of peer pressure and finger-pointing at a pile of dead cronies, but a defence it was nonetheless. 

So he prepared, just as suggested. He wrote his letters with the same care and attention as ever and then spent his other time in quiet study, perhaps faintly disappointed that no more replies arrived, but he made do as best he could with what he had already. There was enough to muse on, more than enough to build on in his own replies. And then the day came, and they took him away with full armed guard to court.

Joe Carroll had always known how to perform to an audience, and perform he did. He recalled the vague thrill of the lecture hall, how his students had listened so intently when he spoke, and that was how the courtroom there reacted. He was fascinating, by all accounts; he could have soliloquised for hours and they’d have listened, rapt. It almost didn’t matter that none of the faces he saw in the room was Ryan Hardy’s.

The judge announced an hour’s recess for lunch, and that was when he knew. It hit him with a perfect crystal clarity as he was shepherded to the room in which he’d spend that hour, a room without windows and just one door they’d lock behind him. He’d known before, of course, in the form of a niggle in the back of his mind that refused all efforts to tease it out by analysis. The anticipation as the guards walked him double-time down the corridor was frankly quite stunning. He supposed they couldn’t understand how lunch in a courthouse was so very exciting to him, but they hardly seemed to care.

A ham sandwich and a bottle of water sat on the table in the room where he would have met his lawyer, had he wished to employ another one, had one particularly wished to be employed by him. Neither guard noticed there was a bite missing from that sandwich, or didn’t care if they did. The federal agent whose badge was sitting there on the table beside his propped up feet certainly didn’t make them raise an eyebrow, either. They left him there and locked him in, like nothing was amiss.

"That’s really a lovely badge," Joe said, as he moved toward the table. "And here I thought you’d lost it."

Ryan didn’t reply. He just dropped his feet from the table and pocketed the badge. Joe supposed it was a temporary thing, a favour owed and called in, but he filed the thought away for perusal at a later date in order to concentrate on the moment at hand.

"No hello? I’m disappointed."

Ryan stood, pushing back the chair from the table and rising, slowly, his movement deliberate. It was so strange to see him after all that time. It was stranger still to see him now, after the letters, now that they knew.

"Not even an insult? But you’re usually so creative."

Ryan moved forward, his steps slow and measured. He barely blinked, which was an odd affect on him. Joe pushed down the urge to step back in reaction and stood his ground, his heartbeat quickening. This was Ryan but Ryan with an edge, Ryan but Ryan in a different register of intensity. Joe didn’t know what to expect, and that turned his stomach in anxious excitement. He was so used to being the author of his own story.

"This is going to be a very one-sided conversation if you’re not going to speak to me."  
Ryan closed the distance between the two of them quickly, in three or four long, rapid strides that took Joe by surprise though he knew he should have seen it coming. He should have expected the flick-knife there at his throat. He should have expected the flash of pain as the back of his head hit the wall behind him. He didn’t fight back. He rather suspected that a struggle wasn’t the point of the exercise.

What he couldn’t have expected was Ryan’s mouth at the pulse in his neck as he pinned him there, tongue and teeth and lips and stubble raking at his skin, making him tingle with the urgency of it. His breath came quickly and he moved his hands but the knife at his throat pressed in just a fraction closer, the edge sharper than anticipated. He dropped his hands and the fingers of Ryan’s free hand circled one of his wrists, pulled his arm up higher, pinned it to the wall beside his head. Ryan pressed against him chest to knee, insinuated one thigh between Joe’s and his mouth trailed down, pushing his collar aside to bite down at his collarbone and suck. Then suddenly he stepped back, abrupt, disengaged completely, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked almost physically sick. Joe was left almost as baffled as he was aroused, and his arousal was acute.

Ryan turned his back on him, the move almost deliberate, as if asking for Joe to try something silly. He knew better, kept the knife in sight and stayed precisely where he was, flushed, his head throbbing, a sting at his throat and an ache somewhere somewhat lower.

"Did you come here to kill me?" he asked. He was genuinely interested in hearing the answer.

Ryan turned. He made a show of closing the knife blade back into its hilt and he set it down on the table behind him, like a dare or like a promise. And Joe went for it, as much as he knew he shouldn’t, as much as he’d told himself no just moments prior, because what else could he do but provoke him?

Ryan was faster than him, of course he was. But he didn’t go for the knife to pick it up, he just knocked it back out of Joe’s reach and turned his shoulder in, let Joe ricochet straight off it as he raised a knee into his belly. Joe grunted, a spectacularly unattractive sound that he resented being made to make as he slumped down to his knees on the worn parquet floor. Ryan stepped closer and it occurred to him that he should lash out, a fist to the kneecap to bring him down too or maybe an elbow to somewhere more sensitive, but something told him no, he shouldn't do it. He sat back on his heels and looked up at him instead, looked up as Ryan’s fingers reached down and tangled tightly in his hair, looked up and saw the conflict in him where he'd always seen such certainty before. He was wavering. Joe couldn’t let that happen. Ryan couldn’t falter, perhaps especially not now.

"You think you’ve made a mistake in coming here," he said. Slowly, very deliberately, he moved one hand to the denim over Ryan’s left calf and squeezed in a facsimile of reassurance. "You didn’t, you know. You didn’t come here on a whim." His fingers moved higher, his palm skimming the back of Ryan’s thigh, rounding his hip, straying the barest fraction of an inch under his t-shirt to tuck under his belt, into his waistband. His skin was hot to the touch, the muscle firm beneath. 

He gave a little tug; Ryan rocked on his heels and let him do it. 

"You’ve been planning this for weeks. You're not the only one who can read between the lines, Ryan; I made a living at it, once upon a time." 

Ryan’s chest rose and fell just a little more quickly with his quickening breath. For once, Joe couldn’t see what would happen next. The uncertainty just heightened his arousal. If he died now, he just wouldn’t care that much about it. The ending would fit the tale exactly.

"Do what you came here to do."

He was back in court before the end of the hour, neat and tidy as if nothing had happened at all. No one saw the bite mark at his collarbone. No one saw the thin line of knife-broken skin at his throat. Bruises at his hips and thighs wouldn't show until the morning, not that anyone would check him for them. It would be their little secret; neither of them had anyone to tell.

***

The first time Ryan came to see him in prison was strange to say the least. All casual interaction before that, at least before his first escape because frankly he’d been avoiding visitors since his most recent return to federal custody, had all been from behind reinforced glass. For him to be frogmarched into an interview room by a particularly burly prison guard and shackled unceremoniously to a table that was bolted down to the floor, it had to be Official Business. 

He expected tall men in FBI windbreakers and buzzcuts reminiscent of the military, maybe Agent Weston and wouldn't that have been a treat. He expected quick-fire questions and that implied but insubstantial threat of physical harm that the FBI did so very well. It was nothing that he couldn’t handle because he’d handled it so many times before. But he hadn’t expected it to be Ryan who entered the room, tense and hard and frowning. Not just because two months had passed from their brief courthouse encounter and Joe's letters had gone unanswered since. The rejection of it stung. That was a feeling he just wasn't used to; it had taken some time for him to name it.

"To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asked. He felt himself frowning at his confounded expectations and made a conscious physical effort to smooth that frown back out.

Ryan leaned against the wall opposite the table, his arms crossed, just looking at him as if weighing his options. He was always weighing his options. He took a slow, deep breath and sighed it out in a huff, running his fingers through his hair.

"Well, I can see this isn’t a social call," Joe said. "So it’s business, I take it. You’re probably not here on behalf of a class in criminology, no matter how exceptional your students may be. I’ll bet you’re a cracking teacher, Ryan. Top marks on ratemyprofessor.com, am I right?"

Ryan’s only response was a slight tilt of his head. He didn’t say a word and so Joe naturally took that, rightly or wrongly, as a signal to continue.

"So, that really only leaves the FBI. But why would they bring you back in? You’re hardly the right man for that job these days, now are you." He held up his hands as best he could in his cuffs. "I don’t mean that as an insult, just that if one were to take a more than cursory glance at your record, it’s not exactly standard Bureau issue. Frankly, I'd expect someone a tad more stable." He paused, mostly for dramatic effect, as he pulled idly on the cuffs. He let them bite lightly at his wrists; it was a strangely reassuring sensation. "Unless you _are_ the right man for the job, of course. Don’t tell me, my followers are at it again." Ryan clenched his jaw. "They _are_! Oh, please, you don’t think I had anything to do with this. We both know you’re the single, solitary soul I’ve had any sort of contact with since I found myself carted off back to the jailhouse."

Ryan said nothing. He just looked at him. Joe hadn’t a clue how he was meant to feel. He found himself all at sea where actual human emotion was concerned sometimes, though he’d learned very early on just how to fake it when in doubt. Perhaps that was the problem: he was trying too hard when Ryan already knew him inside out. He knew him intimately, in the most literal and most profound of senses. 

No one on the far side of the grainy prison cameras he was sure must be in operation would be able to spot a change in his demeanour, but it would mean something to Ryan. He let the mask drop away right then, just for him, to show him what he already knew was underneath.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked.

In the moment that Joe’s façade shifted, Ryan came alive. It was a subtle but discernible phenomenon, like a candle flame lit behind a closed door with just a hint of it finding the cracks. All it took to provoke it was Joe’s total exposure. Perhaps one day Ryan’s would follow.

"I want you to tell me everything," Ryan said. "If we get them, we’ll commute your sentence. Life without parole."

"And what if I don’t want that?"

"You’d prefer lethal injection?"

"Perhaps."

"Then we’re done here." He made a move for the door.

"Wait." Ryan turned, hands on hips. Joe raise his brows. "I’m not going on the record with this, you know. I have an appeal to think about."

"So tell me _off_ the record."

Joe chuckled wryly. "Do you seriously think a word I say here is ever off the record?" The way Ryan shifted his weight was all the answer he needed for that particular question. "You’ll find a way. I have faith."

He left. And Joe felt more powerful then than he had in months. He felt ten feet tall, and no bars could ever hold him.

Ryan was back in under 24 hours. He had a bruise over one eyebrow and walked with just the barest hint of a limp, and Joe could have sworn he almost felt something when he saw that. The elbow of his leather jacket was badly scuffed. He could practically smell blood, though whose it was he couldn’t say.

"You need to talk to me," Ryan said.

"You need to sit down before you fall down," Joe replied.

Ryan hesitated for a second and then grudgingly, heavily, took a seat at the table.

"Have you made arrangements?" Joe asked.

Ryan practically scowled in just the way that said this wasn’t his decision to make. "The answer’s no," he said. "On the record or not at all."

Joe sat back in his seat, brows raised, fingers steepled in front of him. "Then it’s _not at all_ , I’m afraid. I really can’t help you."

He saw the attack coming, of course, had practically begged for it with his denials in the face of Ryan’s obvious need, though he’d known he was asking for trouble. He supposed he wanted trouble. There was apparently only so much of Joe’s extensive cult’s activity that Ryan could actually stomach, and perhaps this was his breaking point right here and now. He couldn’t dodge, cuffed to the table as he was, and felt his nose pop as Ryan bounced his head dramatically off the metal tabletop. He took a breath through his mouth as his nose burned, inhaled blood and coughed it up over his hands. He wiped it off on his fetching prison shirt.

"I’m not entirely sure I deserved that," he said, one hand cupped over his nose, the other hanging awkwardly from the cuffs beside it.

Ryan shrugged. "Pretty sure you did." His fist connected sharply with Joe’s cheekbone, just below his eye, snapping his head around so hard he was practically guaranteed resultant neck pain. "That, too." He stepped in, settled one knee against the bulk of Joe’s thigh and transferred all his weight there to keep him still, to push his elbow into his throat. "Maybe this you don’t deserve." A swift shift and Ryan replaced his elbow at Joe’s throat with both his hands, squeezing steadily, squeezing harder. "Then again, maybe you do."

He was so close Joe could smell the bitter coffee on his breath, feel the warmth of his skin. He couldn’t breathe at all but he refused to panic, just looked at him steadily, maintained that gaze even as his vision began to blur around the edges. He refused to strain against the cuffs, to strain against Ryan, remained perfectly passive because he wasn’t at all concerned. He told himself he wasn’t, a mantra as his vision swam. Ryan wouldn’t kill him. He wouldn’t. He _couldn’t_. But Joe passed out before he could see how their little scene ended.

He had bruises the following day, over his cheek, across his thigh, his throat. He laid his hands over the marks there just above his collar, settling his fingers over the faint shape of Ryan’s hands as best he could. He was struck all at once by the intimacy of it, of the act itself and of his bearing the bruises later, for anyone to see; for a moment it was almost overwhelming.

Ryan was already cuffed to the desk when Joe was brought to the room that morning. Joe was tempted to gloat but just took his seat opposite and watched Ryan over the tabletop as the guard secured his shackles and then beat a hasty retreat. Ryan’s knuckles were scraped, from more than just the cheap shot to Joe’s cheek. There was a split in his bottom lip, mesmerizingly central, and a bruise flaring up over his jaw to his ear. Joe desperately wanted to touch each of those injuries, find out what hurt most. He’d been busy.

"I see the investigation continues apace."

Ryan pulled on the shackles, the chain rattling against the tabletop.

"I want out of this, Joe," Ryan said, and Joe suspected that he didn’t mean the handcuffs. Not _just_ the handcuffs, at any rate. "You need to tell me what you know."

"Did they get to somebody you care about?"

Ryan sighed. He looked tired, beaten up, worn in ways that actually made Joe feel vaguely uncomfortable where he’d always found a perverse enjoyment in the past. "They put Max in the hospital. I don’t expect you to care, but this needs to end."

All of a sudden, it was awkward to look at him. Ryan had his head in his cuffed hands and Joe wanted to look away, wanted to pretend this hadn’t happened. He understood so clearly that he wanted it all to be the way it was before this, before yet more of his followers had come oozing out from the shadows. He could use them, he thought. Perhaps there were enough of them out there to free him again. He suspected he knew a few of them from his prison mail, could maybe lure them out or make contact, direct them, mould them. Perhaps he didn’t have to end his days in federal prison after all. Perhaps, however, he didn’t care too much if he did. Perhaps that was just his ending, though of course he didn’t have to speed himself toward it.

"My terms haven’t changed," Joe said. "Turn off the cameras and turn off the microphones and we’ll sit down, just you and I, and I’ll tell you the whole sordid tale from start to end."

"And the Bureau’s terms haven’t changed," Ryan said, emerging slowly from behind his hands. "They won’t sign off on that."

"Oh dear. And I really thought you’d find a way for us to be alone together." Joe sighed heavily, a little melodramatically.

Ryan paused. He looked at Joe, his gaze steady, suddenly sharp, judging, evaluating, like he could see every dark little fibre of his being with perfect clarity; Joe couldn’t quite tell if he enjoyed the sensation of being so utterly _known_ or not. And then, in an instant, a decision was made.

"There’s a way," Ryan said, his voice low, dark but quiet.

Joe slid forward in his seat, leaned forward against the table, cocked his head inquisitively. "What are you proposing, Ryan?"

Ryan set his jaw, clenched it momentarily, Joe watching the muscles work and trying not to wonder what would happen to Ryan if he severed them. He wondered if he’d brought the flick-knife with him, though it was probably sitting in a box somewhere awaiting his departure if he had. 

"I’m _proposing_ ," he said. The words practically swam in disgust.

Joe waited for him to go on but nothing came. He took that moment to think, to work the question through, to really look at Ryan those few short feet away, assess his body language, assess the situation. But there was no more to that sentence, just two short words, full stop. Joe felt his eyes widen of their own accord. It was genius. It was complete lunacy, of course, but it was _genius_.

"Oh-ho-ho, I see!" he said, breaking into a smile as he wagged a finger, revelling in his own genuine surprise. "Oh Ryan, that’s _charming_. You want to abuse spousal privilege to make me talk to you. That’s devious, you know, even by my standards."

Ryan just jutted his jaw a fraction, and he didn’t say a word.

"You must be truly desperate if that’s your suggestion. Did they hit a nerve?" He frowned. "Oh yes, your lovely niece, how silly of me. But Ryan, Ryan. Marriage is not an institution to be taken lightly! I may be something of a sucker for a pretty face, I think that fact is fairly well known, but I must say this is all very sudden. Give a girl some time!"

Ryan yanked back on the chain at his wrists, actually made Joe jump with the action as much as the sound. "Stop dicking around. We do this or we don’t. No games. We’re way past games."

Obediently, for once in his life, Joe stopped. He went still and his amused expression fell away because he’d seen before just how Ryan would react to that and it was something he found quite wonderful. He wanted to see just a hint of the desire he’d seen in him back there in the courthouse. He realised there was very little that he wouldn’t do to feel that intensity of passion again. It was everything he’d ever wanted from literature. It was everything he’d never understood.

He could reject the offer and most likely he should, but the idea was so very intriguing that it had piqued his considerable intellect. Part of him wanted to know just how far Ryan was willing to take it. He wanted to explore his limits, to push him and see just how and when he began to push back. But there was something else there, too, something darker and insistent like a promise unspoken between the two of them. Because if Ryan couldn’t, wouldn’t tell his friends back in the Bureau what it was that Joe had told him, he’d have to put an end to it all by himself. He looked tired but resolute. Joe wanted very much to know the man that Ryan Hardy would become when he’d been made to kill again. If his recent casual violence was anything to judge by, that man would be spectacular. It was more than worth the risk that he was being taken for a fool.

"Set it up," he said. "But I want a suit. I won’t wear prison-issue clothing to my wedding, Ryan. I just won’t."

They were married in the prison chapel, then whisked away to a room full of over-bright light that smelled of cleaning fluid and seedy desperation. Joe sat down on the bed, his back pressed to the wall, pulled his legs in and wrapped his arms around them. His suit trousers rode up at the ankles and pulled across his shoulders. He popped open the top button of his over-crisp white shirt and rested his head back against the poorly painted plasterboard. He felt small and ugly, slightly cheated, like he’d given up too much of himself in doing this. Perhaps he had. Perhaps he’d made an error in assuming himself the protagonist when this story was actually Ryan’s.

"We don’t have long," Ryan repeated. Joe smiled wryly. He’d already given himself away; this one final step couldn’t hurt any more.

"Then I’ll start at the beginning," he said.

***

A month passed after that day, and then two. His keepers wouldn’t allow him television after his earlier fiascos, expressly forbade idle gossip in his presence, and so he didn’t even know if Ryan was alive or dead. He didn’t know if it was over, had not a single clue if he’d been made a widower. The marriage was still an odd thought in itself, a twist he hadn’t expected. But they wouldn’t tell him what had happened if he asked, and so he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of him asking. 

But he wrote. He continued to write. He imagined Ryan’s death by someone else’s hand and described what that would mean to him in terms he hoped he’d understand, although he barely understood them for himself. It was the bitter, acrid taste of bile in his throat. It was crushing, bewildering, to lose the only person who had ever really known him without flinching. He’d only ever played a part with all the others.

Days stretched on. The news came that his appeal had been denied, though that came as nothing close to a surprise, and Joe found he cared very little for the outcome either way. He wondered if the silence indicated something else entirely, if he’d been tricked and then discarded as soon as Ryan had his story, but that didn’t seem to fit with this scenario. Something had happened, he was certain. 

Joe’s writing turned bitter and blunt and hard with a wave beneath it of hot desire. There was no pretending anymore that his epistolic lover wasn’t always fashioned after Ryan, all literary subterfuge abandoned now it didn’t matter; in bald, bold terms, the subject of his letters became _you_ , not _he_. He threw around the word _revenge_. He meant it.

A brief statement in a briefer letter told him his death sentence had been commuted. Life without the possibility of parole: it was beyond his expectations. He’d expected to die there in prison before he hit the age of 50, all appeals exhausted, a needle in his arm and a sea of unfamiliar faces watching from behind a pane of glass, but now he had a life to live there. He had to wonder if he wanted it, though suicidal melodrama had never been his style. The only problem was, he had no one left. Mentions of life outside the prison walls were few and far between in the letters he received and so he judged outside reality from their absence; three frequent writers had stopped writing to him and Ryan hadn’t returned in person or in prose. That meant something. It meant something jarring.

And then, three months later to the day, he was back in that room one evening with the bright light and brighter walls, its miniscule kitchenette with plastic knives that would barely cut butter and drinking glasses made from plastic so thin they almost leaked. The guards unlocked his shackles and left him there alone. When the door opened 15 minutes later, his pulse gave a thud and he loathed himself for it when the interruption was revealed to be a guard stepping in to put a sandwich on the table. He only looked up for the second time by reflex, when the door swept open suddenly perhaps half an hour later. When Ryan stepped inside, his stomach lurched. These physical reactions to his new, nascent emotions were utterly abhorrent to him.

Joe didn’t speak, though he knew that was unlike him, though there were questions there right on the tip of his tongue. He leaned against the wall with his hands tucked in at the small of his back and he looked at Ryan warily, watching as he moved. There was something off about him. 

"I was shot." 

That clarified while raising so many new questions. When Joe raised his brows somewhat quizzically, Ryan pulled up his t-shirt and showed off a long, crooked scar stretching down over his side. The whole length was angry, still healing. "Three surgeries. I died." He eased down the waistband of his jeans just a fraction, exposed a smaller scar, this one an obvious bullet wound. "Twice." He dropped his shirt back down. "But it’s over. We got them. All of them."

Joe cocked his head. "We?"

Ryan shrugged again as he leaned against the table. He picked up the ham sandwich and took one bite before he set it back down. 

" _Me_ ," he clarified, mouth half full of ham, casual as if the comment meant next to nothing. But he looked at Joe as he swallowed. Judging from his expression then, it really had been Ryan all alone, doing all the dirty work. He wondered just how many more people he’d had to kill to get it done. He wondered how he’d done it.

As Joe watched, Ryan fished an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and tossed it onto the table between them. He gestured at it wordlessly, slightly irritated with the whole scene, and Joe moved to pick it up. He slid the paper from inside as he stood back against the wall. _12 dead in Carroll Cult shooting_ , the newspaper clipping read. He recognised three faces, though the others must have been a set of newer recruits. Two hostages dead. Another eighteen random civilians snuffed out in the whole affair, whose names meant nothing to him except that one was named _Lenore_. A smudged newsprint photo of Max Hardy with one arm in a sling, receiving a commendation from the mayor. It was over. Ryan had taken at least twelve more lives in order to make sure of it. 

"I see you got what you wanted," Joe said, tossing the envelope back down onto the table. 

Ryan pushed himself away from the door, stepping forward with his hands tucked into the pockets of his jeans. Joe watched him move all the way across the room where he rested on his shoulder against the wall right beside him, head tilted, almost unbearably close. 

"You didn’t?"

Joe wanted so many things that in the end it was rather difficult to say whether he’d got what he wanted or not. So he turned slightly against the wall and ran one hand almost tentatively over Ryan’s denim-clad hip, fingers straying up beneath his t-shirt. His fingertips found that healing scar and pressed just hard enough to make Ryan wince as Joe’s gaze flickered up to meet his, but not hard enough to make him look or pull away. This new casual, permissive nearness was fascinating. 

He pushed up Ryan’s shirt and he looked instead of touching, then looked _and_ touched. Then he moved his hands and pushed Ryan’s stiff new leather jacket back and off his shoulders; Ryan’s look was all surprise beneath a careful construction of indifference as he let the jacket drop to the floor at his feet. Joe pushed up his shirt again, both hands gathering it until it caught under Ryan’s arms and after a moment’s careful consideration, he lifted them. Joe lifted Ryan’s shirt up over his head and tossed it down on top of the discarded jacket, baring his chest in the stark light. 

He had no earthly idea what he was doing as he explored Ryan’s torso with his fingertips, one thumb tracing the scar of his near-fatal stab wound, the other the stubbly line of his jaw. Ryan let him. When he pressed his mouth to a long-healed bullet wound at his shoulder, Ryan let him. When he bit down lightly at Ryan’s bruised collarbone, he let him. When his mouth found his and they kissed, he let him do it. He tasted of coffee. He tasted familiar.

***

It was quite the surprise to wake in the morning and find that Ryan was still present in the room. He’d expected him to leave at the first opportunity. Frankly, he’d half expected Ryan would never allow him to wake up again. At that point, it really would have been over.

He was wearing the same clothes as he had the day before, just seemed a little more tousled. He tossed Joe an apple from the kitchenette and Joe pondered its Biblical significance for a moment before he took a bite, still lounging in the bed.

"Are you going to say good morning?"

Ryan glanced back at him over his shoulder. "I’m gonna say goodbye." He stepped into his boots and knelt to tie them.

"Should I expect to hear from your attorney, Mr Carroll?"

Ryan laughed unexpectedly; from the look on his face it seemed he’d surprised himself, too. 

"Well, you never know when we’ll need to do this again," he said. Joe mentally added the missing _Mr Hardy_ to Ryan’s sentence. Perhaps he’d change his name.

Joe eased himself from the bed, shivered lightly and pulled on his prison-issue undershirt. He smelled like sex and Ryan’s hair gel that seemed to get _everywhere_ , and was willing to lay odds that Ryan did, too.

It had been so slow the night before, had left him completely and unexpectedly without bruises. Joe had told himself that the languor was due simply to the fact Ryan was so obviously still injured, that multiple surgeries and gunshot wounds would necessarily slow anyone down, but that wasn’t exactly the point at all. It was strange. He was still somewhat baffled by it. 

Ryan had undressed him carefully, fingers finding the front of Joe’s shirt and he’d started work on the buttons there, popping them open one by one as if they’d had all the time in the world. Perhaps they had. He looked at him naked in the harsh white light and nodded to the bed. Joe had wondered briefly, idly, if he should be concerned, if he should lie down or leave, if he should gesture for Ryan to follow. He lay down on the stiff white sheets and watched, his head propped up on one hand as Ryan finished undressing himself and then stood there, watching his watcher for a moment. Scars littered his body and his cock was just as hard as Joe’s was. 

It had been slow. Ryan settled himself down above him, slipped his forearms in under Joe’s scapulae and rested there, close and pressed against him. Joe paused before he raised his hands to Ryan’s hips and rested them there lightly as they breathed together. It was slow, from start to end; when Ryan pushed inside him, Joe gave a breathless laugh with the slowness of it. Ryan had rolled his eyes but Joe just didn’t care. He’d almost forgotten what genuine enjoyment felt like.

Ryan sat back on his heels halfway through, hips still rocking against him, into him. Joe watched him, rapt, breath unsteady as Ryan’s fingers closed around his cock and stroked, slowly, torturously slowly. Joe’s fingers twisted in the sheets and shifted his hips, pushed down against the cock inside him, up against the hand around him, utterly without shame or inhibition. Joe came first with Ryan running a very close second. 

They stayed like that for a languorous moment, hot, a sheen of sweat on bare skin, before Ryan shivered suddenly. He dropped down beside him, head finding the next pillow, and he pulled the sheets up over them both. As odd as it seemed, considering what had gone immediately before, Joe had suddenly felt awkward, disconcerted; they looked at each other, heads turned in toward each other just inches apart, eyes almost too close for their gazes to focus. Ryan’s eyes were so clear and so steady but there was an abyss right there inside them now his turmoil had been briefly tucked away. Joe couldn’t help but suspect that he’d just met the real Ryan Hardy.

"Don’t think this means anything," Ryan had told him. But he rather thought it had.

"What have you told your niece?" Joe asked, as Ryan finished tying his boots at the other side of the room. 

"The bare minimum." Ryan pulled on his jacket. 

"What _will_ you tell her, and that delightful fiancé of hers?"

Ryan shrugged. "The bare minimum." He made for the door.

"Have you thought about what you’ll do should someone higher up think question our little arrangement?" he asked. "Aren’t you concerned at all?"

"If they drag my ass in front of a judge, I’ll make them believe it." He knocked on the door. The lock clicked open from the outside.

"Could you make _me_ believe it, Ryan?"

Ryan smiled, just the faintest of twitches at the corners of his mouth as he looked at him, but it was there and Joe saw it. Only Joe would ever see.

"You believe it already," Ryan said, as he left. The door clicked shut behind him.

And for better or worse, Joe supposed he did."

**Author's Note:**

> Author is well aware that the legal issues discussed herein (amongst other things) are bordering on movie-level stretchings of the truth. But if you suspended disbelief for the marriage of convenience, I suspect you won't really mind that.


End file.
